Fondness, liking and attachment even to the degree of committing suicide upon the loss of the person coveted, may not be true love withal. Suicide is no test of true love. Many a man commits suicide after losing his wealth, yet money is not loved for its own sake, but for the power it possesses of procuring the means for enjoyment. A person may take his own life because it feels lonely after the failure to secure the desired union. An individual may risk life and comfort to obtain possession of a coveted body for its own enjoyment. Such actions are no indication of genuine love and, generally, they prove just the contrary, just as the unrestrained, unlimited desire which ignores all considerations of honor, prosperity and peace, does not prove true love but, on the contrary, the urgings of the primal instinct. Neither should the sacred term “true love” be applied to the feeling that animates selfish and impulsive idiots to assassinate cowardly an unresponding mate. Such designs just prove the selfish lust. The gross, sensual infatuation which leads a man to shoot a woman who rejects him, or which leads a woman to throw acid in the face of the beloved man, is absolutely antithetic to refined, ardent, sentimental love, which impels the lover to sacrifice his own life and comfort rather than let any harm come to the one beloved. This true love is only possible among the refined and cultured. Hence the greater part of humanity has never known the emotions of sentimental love. The only love it knows is sensual love.[AF] Men and women with blunt intellects also have blunt feelings and are incapable of experiencing true love. They can only be inspired by the love of the body. This love, to be sure, is not necessarily coarse or obscene, yet it is a stranger to true sentimental love. CHAPTER XIII SENTIMENTAL LOVE Sentimental, or true love, is a conscious altruism and is the antithesis of the egotistic sensual love. Before applying the term true love to the relation of both mates, the test of disinterested affection, as found in the instinctive parental love, must be applied. The distinction between sensual and sentimental love is the selfish desire of libido in the former and the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection in the latter. The two emotions have some characteristics in common, and for that reason, sensual love is, as a rule, mistaken for sentimental love, even by the greatest thinkers and best poets. An essential and invariable ingredient in sentimental, as well as in sensual love, is the imperative desire for an absolute monopoly of the beloved person. But while in sensual love this desire springs from an egotistic source, selfish elements are foreign to this desire in sentimental love. The latter knows only devotion and sympathy, which urge the lover to seek the welfare of the one beloved, if need be at the expense of his own.